MOVING TO FRONT--UPDATED
The following law schools (listed in rough order of strength of the law school overall--though these are all major law schools) have a strong commitment to philosophy:
Yale University
University of Chicago
New York University
University of California, Berkeley
University of Pennsylvania
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of Virginia
Georgetown University
University of California, Los Angeles
Law school hiring is extremely pedigree-sensitive (more so than philosophy), so the further down this list you go for the JD, the more difficult your prospects will be in legal academia, though all these schools have graduates who now teach in law schools. (See, e.g., this data.) Yale, NYU, Berkeley, Michigan, and UCLA all have "top ten" philosophy departments, though with differing strengths. Chicago has a "top twenty" philosophy department, though its strengths are primarily in the history of philosophy (esp. ancient and post-Kantian Continental), which could be a good fit for a student with strong historical interests (including the Continental traditions in philosophy). Penn has an established JD/PhD program, and a philosophy department with particular strength in political philosophy, which could be a good complement for a JD/PhD student. (Columbia still has the great legal philosopher Joseph Raz on a half-time basis, though he in his late 70s, and I don't know how much longer he will continue to teach.)
UPDATE: A student writes:
Thanks for your recent blog post about schools for a JD/PhD in Philosophy. I am looking to apply shortly for philosophy PhDs (and I already hold a deferred JD offer, though may reapply elsewhere if necessary) so this was very interesting. If you don’t mind, I would be very interested to know your answers to a few questions I have.
Firstly, neither Harvard nor Stanford appear on your list. Both are top law schools with top philosophy departments, so I was wondering what your rationale was for not including them? They also seem to be amongst the few law schools to fund (or mostly fund) the JD component if one takes a JD/PhD (unlike, for instance, Yale) which seems like a fairly important selling point.
Secondly, what are your thoughts on taking the PhD at a different institution to one’s law school? It seems to be theoretically possible, and there appear to be some obvious benefits — NYU, for instance, has a great philosophy department, but there are much stronger JD programmes. Similarly, I could try to sandwich a JD between an Oxford BPhil and DPhil (if I was lucky enough to be granted funded admission; though — as I did very well in my philosophy undergrad [in the UK] — that is not a negligible possibility). Those are just hypotheticals; but do you think that there are good reasons to only take the JD and the PhD at the same institution?
Since others may have similar questions, I thought they would be worth addressing here.
On the first point: the list above is of law schools with a serious investment in philosophy. Harvard and Stanford do not have such an investment on the law school side. Each school has some faculty interested in philosophical topics (and who are accomplished legal scholars), but Stanford has no one with formal training in philosophy, while Harvard has but one faculty member with a PhD in philosophy out of 80 or so tenured faculty, which is remarkable (he also hasn't done any work in law & philosophy in quite some time). There are, to be sure, law faculty without PhDs who are substantial contributors to law and philosophy (Schauer in general jurisprudence and free speech theory, Ferzan in criminal law theory, both at Virginia, are good examples). Someone who wanted to work on, e.g., tort theory (Goldberg at Harvard) or property theory (Smith at Harvard) or constitutional theory (Fallon and Sunstein at Harvard)--all from a philosophical angle--would find good folks to work with at Harvard. But in general jurisprudence, which is rightly central, it's a different story. On the law school side, a philosophically-minded student is going to be largely on his or her own. The generous funding of the JD/PhD at both schools is a plus, but in the cases I know about, the student was largely self-directed (or directed by philosophy faculty) with regard to their work at the intersection of law-and-philosophy.
On the second point: it often can make sense to do the JD at one school, and the PhD elsewhere, depending on one's interests, though the example given is inapt. For a JD/PhD student, U.S. News law school rankings are fairly irrelevant; what matters is faculty quality, which U.S. News doesn't measure. In terms of faculty quality, there are not "much stronger JD programmes" than NYU. Maybe there's one, Yale, and even that is arguable; by contrast, there are several law schools with stronger faculties than Stanford's. (There are plenty of metrics which will reveal that the Stanford faculty is not as strong as NYU's, for example. The difference in faculty quality between the top five in these metrics is minimal.) NYU is very large, which is a disadvantage in U.S. News and in measures of per capita success of graduates, but a JD/PhD student should be thinking about the faculty: the average student and his/her outcomes isn't very relevant. An Oxford DPhil and an American JD could be a very strong credential on the U.S. teaching market, and Oxford is still the world leader in law and philosophy, as it has been for many decades now.
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